Poetry Planet

Jack Hirschman (USA, 1933)

Submitted by wpm2011 on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 01:00

NEVER AGAIN

They were gassed, burned by the millions
simply because they existed.
Those who survived said: Never Again!
They were asked to come to Hanoi
and continue the socialist revolution.
They responded: Never Again!

We will never again trust any government.
We will make our home in Palestine,
defeat the Arabs there, scatter them or
let them live as ragged shadows
in the camps of our occupation.
We will live in and on the capital of America,

as Israel, by name, as the Jewish nation,
and never again be holocausted for
the crime of simply being.
But even as Israel grew and prospered,
those whom it displaced and arrested
were whispering: Never Again!

Poor and landless, they built their resistance
and fought and lost again and again
to Zionism’s army of American weapons.
The language of socialism, of the friendship
and harmony of peoples of different cultures
died of attrition in the Middle East, from

money. Deals. Dunny meals. Doomy mules.
Dummy moles. Mummy doles. The Star
of David unfurled over the land,
but the real Davids were in the streets
throwing stones at the Goliath.
O philistine irony and reversal of the Hebrew.

They who are the poorest and stateless,
who’ve turned their hatred of submission
to slavery into martyr brigades of suicided
human weapons, and called their brethren
to join their attack upon the ferocious colony
of the United States of Exploitation;

they, the poorest and homeless, in whom
the only solution still breathes, the only
solution that isn’t genocide or fratricide
or a final solution itself, where hand-clasps
and words can still open the gates to the
language of the future socialism of New

Israel and New Palestine,
--- where Never Again!
will be the united cry
of both, aimed
at the land of the fraud
and the home of the greed.

Jack Hirschman (USA, 1933)

* * *

THE CHILDREN

allover will remember
their legs their arms,
the amputated spaces
will be Nothing branded
into their little souls,
never to forget, Israel,
you shattered their vessels
with your gunfire, shit on
the word, said fuck you
to the fetus in the womb.

You not they pissed on
your own wholly unholy
tetragramaton, its letters
a fraud and a fake.
I wish I could feed you
hand grenades in your mug,
I want to stuff dead children
into your eyes, lovers of learning
lies.

May selah be broken
in your mouth, may amen
never find chapter and verse,
may your food turn into
the gangrenous limbs of the
children you’ve felled,
those little trees of sparks.
You’ve killed David over
and over, you star of death.

O aliyah, how low!

O victory of defeat!

O stones growing in
the clenches of fists
enraged,

against you,
you rattler of bones!

Jack Hirschman (USA, 1933)

* * *

JACK HIRSCHMAN was born in The Bronx, NY, in 1933. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some 45 translations from a half-dozen languages, as well as the editor of anthologies and journals. In 2006, he was announced as the fourth Poet Laureate of San Francisco. That same year, his massive collection called The Arcanes was published in the English language in Italy. After his official term as Poet Laureate finished in late 2007, he became Poet in Residence with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, in part to continue organizing this Festival with Friends. His laureate-series book is All That’s Left, published in 2008. He’s a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA). He is currently the director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival.
Hirschman was named Poet-in-Residence with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library in 2009 and currently holds that status. Hirschman continues his work supporting the literary community and is the key organizer for the now biennial San Francisco International Poetry Festival.
Since the 2007 Festival, Hirschman, in partnership with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library, have presented smaller poetry festivals in a variety of languages, including the Latino Poetry Festival, the Vietnamese Poetry Festival and the Iranian Arts Poetry Festival.
Hirschman is active with the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and curates the Poets 11 Anthology, which collects poetry from each of the City’s 11 districts.